Alright! Today I'm reviewing the third movie in the Jurassic World trilogy and the sixth Jurassic Park film with the hope that this is the last time I'll be seeing a Jurassic Park movie in theaters. The franchise is extinct. Hopefully.
The first Jurassic Park was a classic, masterfully blending humor, philosophy, and horror-filled tension in VFX that blew the world away in 1993. It's a classic through and through. The sequels are varying degrees of okay, with my favorite being Jurassic World, which had a great blend of humor, popcorn action, and the spectacle of an operational park wrapped in b-movie cheese and undoubtedly cool moments. Jurassic World Dominion should have the franchise's third-best hook - 1) What if dinosaurs were brought back? 2) What if the park was operational? 3) What if humans and dinosaurs had to coexist?
That being said, Jurassic World Dominion took a lot of the spectacle out of the dinosaurs. They are no longer triumphant and magnificent creatures of grandeur, but rather scary monsters whose only purpose is to chase the protagonists around various locations. They're all teeth at this point, just scary lizards. When the franchise depicts the dinosaurs like that is when it's at its worse. These are dinosaurs. They're cool. They're majestic. Give them that majesty.
On that note, the overall plot and locales of the film are all mediocre. There are two plotlines going on here - the clone girl from the last movie was kidnapped, so Jurassic World stars Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard (Both of whom are lacking the charm the first Jurassic World movie allotted them) go on a quest to save her. The other plotline follows a plague of locusts ravishing the crop supply, potentially causing global famine, and Jurassic Park stars Sam Neill, Laura Dern, and Jeff Goldblum go on a quest to uncover the conspiracy behind where the locusts came from. The locust plot is, for most of the film, far more interesting but bereft of dinosaurs.
The movie spends the first hour in a state of "Wow, this is... awful" exposition and dialogue with character moments that feel extremely generic in the unique Jurassic Park franchise. It's not until the film remembers it has dinosaurs, and that the audience is here to see those dinosaurs, do things pick up and the dumb fun begins. Before that, it was tedious and expository fun. Unfortunately, that turnaround is over an hour into the movie. There's little to no dinosaur action or tenseness to the entire first act, and that destroys the film.
It's the setpiece in Malta that gives the movie that spark of life it was so desperately missing, going from lame and overly complicated to big and loud in a cheesy blockbuster way. Basically, when the characters are talking, watch out. When the dinosaurs are eating people, well, grab the popcorn. The movie has a few tense edge-of-your-seat action scenes (Specifically three - one in Malta, one on the ice, and one in a puddle). The rest is various shades of mediocre and passable.
The movie is also not funny. The Jurassic Park movies, or at least the first one, have always had a very specific type of humor. The characters interacting with each other, debating on ethics, and reacting to the situations made the film entertaining to watch. Jurassic World was humorous in the sense that it didn't take itself too seriously - concepts like "Use the raptors in the military" are rightly guffawed at, and that made it funny. Jurassic World Dominion is completely missing any of that charm. Only newcomer DeWanda Wise seemed to be having fun here, brightening the movie immensely.
Location location location is another message one can take away from Jurassic World Dominion. These dinosaurs need to stay on an island, apparently, where they look their best and have lots of opportunities to eat people in brutal ways. Not a lot of people are eaten in this movie (I suppose the complaints from Zara's death in Jurassic World finally took their toll on the franchise). The dinosaurs also look extremely ugly and no longer majestic in snowy forests and cityscapes. Gray-on-gray is never a good color scheme.
However, my biggest problem with the film is, in fact, a leftover from its predecessor Fallen Kingdom. Simply put, I do not care about the Lockwoods, the clone girl, or any wonder at that fact. I am wowed by the dinosaurs, not the regular-looking human girl. I was over Jurassic Park retcons by the time they introduced the previously unseen island in The Lost World: Jurassic Park. The revelation that there was a co-founder still rings hollow to me, and reactions to that offscreen cofounder ring equally hollow. It got to the point I spent most of Dominion's superfluous runtime wondering how they could have made it better - the best I came up with was to have her be a clone of Ariana Richards' Lex Murphy from the first Jurassic Park. All that's needed for the plotline is a young scientist who dies and gives birth to a clone. Shoot, even in my (Awful) 2018 review of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, I noted Lockwood's role as a dying man with a connection to Jurassic Park could have been filled by Lex's brother Tim. Then the audience has a connection to the character and the retcon is unneeded. Cast a similar-looking actress and/or CGI it until it looks uncannily perfect and it works.
Aside from seeing the original trinity of actors back together and the great addition of DeWanda Wise's sassy pilot, there's not much reason to like the weirdly colon-less titled Jurassic World Dominion. A few tense moments and shots of dinosaurs don't make a movie, characters, plot, and charm do.
Overall, I give Jurassic World Dominion a 5/10. "A mix of tedious stupid and fun stupid, Jurassic World Dominion leans more towards the former."
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| It makes me want to binge the Jurassic Park movies but stop after the first one. |
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